SMX Munich is taking place at the moment and Johanna Langer is there for us covering the talks. In this post she gives you an overview of the session with Marcus Tober and Markus Hövener.

When Marcus Tober, CEO of Search Metrics GmbH introduced himself, he said: “I am the founder of SEO”. This was a slip of the tongue and it loosened the atmosphere directly from the beginning. He has been in the SEO industry since the beginning and is the founder of Searchmetrics.

The fundamental question that Marcus wanted to answer in this session was: “What sites work well and why?”.

Links are still important!

The Hummingbird update had the goal that Google learnt to understand content. This results in less diversity and more semantics of the SERP. Marcus said: “Therefore, you now have to try really hard to get more rankings”.

Google currently has no other choice than to rely on links. A study of Search Metrics shows that both the number and the quality of backlinks, even at this time are very important. If you integrate meaningful links in a guest article, that’s good. Why should experts in such contributions just want to “only set links”?

Some examples of good links

Finance: finanzen.net developed the idea to create a value added calculator (with a currency converter ) = > they got numerous very good backlinks.

Reference.com : The site has created a ” Evergreen Site”, where the content was updated daily ( “Word of Day” ) = > a lot of good backlinks were generated.

Zillow : The company created content for flat and house buyers. Here it was shown how big is the crime rate is in which districts (it was called the Mortgage Calculator). This also brought a lot of content-relevant links – not only for that moment, but ongoing (evergreen).
Unfortunately, many content marketing campaigns just have a temporary effect.

Trulia : The website gives an overview of crime in flash (interactive). This content managed to acquire many good links. What you can learn from this is that you can aggregate data and thus create something new and something, which is also permanently up to date.

Wetter.com : The company has got a problem because they had many links with their widget, which were already historically incorporated sitewide on many of their partner websites. To fix the problem, many of the anchor texts were changed. But the change in the link text in the widget did not harm the rankings of the top keywords => apparently the anchor is no longer so important?!

What is always important : The added value for the user must be compliant with Google guidelines.

Markus Hövener said that it is a good idea to look at other sites as role models, which are well linked. So we can learn, what works well and what does not.

It is about analyzing the well- linked sites and figure out which sites are willing to link to the relevant content. After that, the webmaster can be contacted. Here Markus said, that the phone is very ineffective and that follow ups increase conversion rates tremendously, that multiple points of contact should be used and you need patience: you get many commitments after a while.

But it is important to make the content on your own site better than the “model sites”. This is the only way the potential link partner can also be made into a real link partner.

The central question

The central question is: What websites are there which have a high DomainPOP and a high visibility index and of which there are many? In what topics are the users really interested? What interests the potential link partner?

What’s important for good links

Furthermore, Markus gave some tips to get links from universities:

Always look for a specific contact

Ask normal people, not the professor

Requests are often passed on, so stay tuned

Follow ups are important!

In particular, thinking about the target group is very important: students, children, homosexuals, animal friends, etc. => minorities are very exciting => “They are finally doing something for us.” Here DERTOUR a travel company has a very good example:

http://www.dertour.de/gaytravel/. First you should check whether you already have content for that target group that is well linked? If so, you should additionally strengthen this!

Markus said: The theme that works best are children and parents.

This is a post written by Johanna Langer, an SEO Account Director & Conversion Optimization Specialist with the agency blueSummit in Munich. She also worked for the Scout24 group as SEO specialist and has many years of experience in online marketing. Johanna also has a real passion for horse riding.

This post was written by an author who is not a regular contributor to State of Digital. See all the other regular State of Digital authors here.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the contributor and not necessarily those of State of Digital.